Quoting JT_Logged, reply 36Well Stardock, it's been a fun run these nearly 4 years, but seeing that Rebellion is "Sins of the Titans" and the Vasari are screwed up beyond imagination it's about time to hit the road.  For all the little things 1.04 fixed, it's the big things you totally missed.  Rebellion is the worst "sequel/expansion : sexpansion or expanquel -take your pick and pack it" since Highlander 2.

...
But, it's been a blast.  Semaz, logging out.


Semaz, you're a smart guy and a good modder, with an emphasis on the latter. Let me take this opportunity to say you're acting like a fucking retard if you aren't looking at the sheer amount of potential that the mere existence of the Titan entity presents to us. Sure I'm being an arrogant son of a bitch right now, but I dare say I can back this up, or at the least explain it.

Though before I do that, let me present the limitations of the Titan system Stardock made, and how they are both one of the stupidest things ever done, but also one of the easiest to bypass, AI included. This also contains a lot of language suitable for sailors because I feel like it and I'm going to have fun with this

You can only build one Titan, and it regains XP on death. This is stupid as you can farm the fuck out of everything and makes this game Sins of the Titans. But everyone knows vanilla Sins is pretty fucking lame, I personally give zero shits about vanilla Sins and bought this game because it has a damn good engine that can be screwed with to great lengths. I haven't played vanilla Sins, at all, for over a year and a half. The closest I've gotten to it within that time period is Maelstrom, and that's as gold as the fictionally golden streets of America in immigrant folk tales. Now back to the meat, you can bypass both of these idiocies by making them spawnable via an autocasting ability. on a Titan Factory. This is important as the Titan Factory will tell the AI the prices of Titans, making them save up for the ships. Further, you only let the AI research the ability to traditionally build Titans, with an off-grid tech. Now the key is, this off-grid tech has the pre-requiste of the research tech that unlocks the autocasting Titan ability. This is key as once the AI has enough to build the Titan normally, the ability will fire off before it can "build" the Titan. Further, the ability can be made up such that it will immediately spawn a placeholder Titan, to keep the supply cost locked and to keep the AI from building a Titan. The real Titan is spawned once the spawning buff's time period elapses, and the placeholder Titan is killed at the same moment, via a passive OnDeath OnBuffFinish wiith a TimeElapsed finishCondition. This isn't all. As the ability is set to autocast, it will keep firing off until the AI reaches the desired number of Titans. Oh did I forget to mention that you can choose to limit the number of total Titans a player can build if you so desire? Well you can, setting it to any damn number is easy as balls, even with it's limitations. Now on a per planet basis, each planet's factory can easily spawn up to four Titans. I personally have limits of one, two, and four already in, for various Titan variants. And if you want more than that, you can do one of two things. One is get the genius who made this system work, GoaFan, to help modify the buff chains to allow for more per planet. The second, and more interesting methods, is to put factories on more planets. This can be done in a number of ways, one is to make custom maps, random or premade, that have the player start with multiple colonized planets at the start of the game, they can be shitty no slot no pop 'roids for all you care, or even make certain planets, such as Shipyards, spawn with capturable Titan Factories (similar to mines, ship graveyards, etc). As I recall you can make it so all the factories (multiple to ensure every faction is covered) are simply owned by the planet owner. Hell I'd be more than happy to give you all the shit I've done so far for you to use in 7DS. In fact I'd love to see this used more because it is motherfucking brilliant.

I think it's rather obvious how this can change the Zeus-damned game, you can make a whole mode, technically map(s), where the Shipyards are the whole fucking game, and not only that, you can make some cheaper than others, some take less build time, and so on. This is a new paragraph as it's starting to talk about the reasons why Titans are the fucking best thing since star bases. There's the obvious Titans can make a whole game mode onto themselves which Stardock and Ironclad probably never thought of because they care about things like diplomacy, which has an expansion of the same name which is in truth the worst Sins expansion ever. The only reason Diplomacy was worth a cent was because they fixed bugs that they should've already done, that shouldn't already exist, and because months after they fucking released the thing they finally listened to Major Stress and the TSOP team who have been offering to clean the laundry for years only to be ignored for absolutely no Zeus-damned reason. Now where was I? Oh right, Titans. They are their own entity. I'm repetitive as this means you can make whole abilities crafted around them, or against them, versus lumping them with capital ships. This seems absolutely meaningless at first, but this has implications that you obviously haven't thought of.

Now what the fuck does this even mean? Right now Sins has this fancy thing called "cruisers", which are supposedly something different or notably distinct. That's a fucking load of bullshit, they're just beefy frigates. Frigates are shit tier as they have limitations like they get no fucking battle experience, and most annoying to me, you put a planet bombing stat on them and they rush to a planet like a bunch of drunk pigs on an automated conveyer belt heading to their fucking deaths. Whomever did this should be slapped across the fucking face as they didn't tie it to the existing Siege frigateRoleType which is supposed to govern automatic behaviors and auto-attack but clearly doesn't. Plus it's dumb as capital ships don't have this fucking limitation, they fucking work right. This is relevant as you can make "heavy cruisers" out of specially made capital ships. Make them have less benefits from leveling, and fixedlevel0 abilities, and suddenly you have fucking cruisers that can bomb planets and gain battle experience. And I'm not fucking done yet, using the various statCountTypes, assuming you don't have too many fucking ships, but that's impossible as you have a limit of 9, you can guide the AI into effectively building capital ships. It fucking loves CapitalShipCarrier and CapitalShipBattleship, in that order. Give those, exclusively, to the two "Capital Ships" you want the AI to build the most of and it fucking will. Then give CapitalShipUtility0 and CapitalShipUtility1 to two other capital ships you want the AI to build in decent numbers, and CapitalShipUtility2 to the rest. Then, here's the best part, in the one AI-only tech you have in order to make the AI more competant, you make every capital ship start with three levels of XP when it comes out of the factory. As a bonus, you should also give it an extra 4 logistic slots, because then that will make the AI into something more fearsome than a decent human player. You might think "oh it's Sins of the Capital Ships now" but that's fucking wrong. You do this so the AI will build the fuck out of capital ships. You can have two tiers of capital ships, ones which are "cruisers" which cost less and benefit less from leveling up, and more traditional capital ships which do. Hell you can even have capital ships with the same health/weaponry/speed, but the differences are abilities and level up benefits, which is a pretty fucking awesome sight. Anyways the AI will build capitals in numbers that will fuck you up and I've seen this bloody happen with my own motherfucking eyes, where I've tried to flat out exploit the AI but it fucked my day up regardless. This will happen even if you leave capital ship crews in as a researchable item, but really it's best to give everything 999 capital ship crews starting, as this make shit much more fun and manageable, plus you can slap in capital ship crew bonuses into random techs to make the AI more likely to research shit. Anyways, the AI will ignore pretty much all frigates except for those with fighter squadrons, for cheap fighter support, antifighters, support ships, scouts, colonizers, and possibly envoys. Did I mention this has all been done on an AI that has access to none of the diplomacy pacts and envoys? Because fuck Diplomacy and what it stands for, just lock teams and the AI gives zero shits about that useless dirt. Now you have three fucking tiers of ships, frigates, capital ships (which should be the mainstay of your forces because fuck year Star Destroyers and Dreadnaughts of fucking doom because fuck you that's why), and Titans which are the absolute lords of everything because they will make you shit your pants. And Stardock apparently made the cannon fodder known as corvettes possibly be a real sub-class of frigates as of 1.04, which might make for a fourth class of ship, but fuck those things. Oh and you're probably wondering how XP would work for these radically different capital ships. I hope you aren't too attached to the fifth ability slot, as you can set up a passive to spawn a frigate that dies immediately that will generate a number of XP. Then the XP outlined in gameplay.constants is just there to give bonuses based on the level of the ship with the bulk of XP being based on the ship itself, like fucking frigates which is bloody awesome. All of this is possible because we can make our old super capital ships into their own fucking entity type.

Did I forget to mention that all of this, except for the capital ship XP system, has been both done and tested? I would fucking know as I've spent many hours of the past month or so coding because I fucking felt like it. And I've been able to do all of this because there's an entity called "Titan". Oh and I'm 90% sure some modders were able to tie the SB's phase jumping to the Destabilize Phase Space upgrade.

P.S. I respect you as you're one of the few people here willing to call a spade a spade when many here try to be politically correct, and if you don't look at this wonderful wall of text I've made for you which actually contains legitimately useful information I'll lose a lot of that respect I have for you. I bid you good day sir and the best of luck in your modding endeavors.

Quoting Lavo_2, reply 55If you think I was really being serious there I think you need to get your head checked. I had fun writing that wall of text, plus it included some useful content in top that, so I can't say I really care for your commentary.

Stop lieing. It wasn't any fun at all if you couldn't squeeze what you wanted to say into smaller paragraphs.

Don't even bother Lavo...

Sigh...

I wish the level here on these forums would go back to where it was about one year ago, when people were actually serious. [e digicons]:'([/e]

Quoting Teun-A-Roonius, reply 59Don't even bother Lavo...

Sigh...

I wish the level here on these forums would go back to where it was about one year ago, when people were actually serious.

And then came Mecha, and Qu4r, and me.

I wish the level here on these forums would go back to where it was about one year ago, when people were actually serious.

Phase stabilizers are a prerequisite.  The easiest answer to this whole problem is to add an upgrade slot that you have to buy for each SB you want to be able to jump.  The added benefit is that you won't be able to have 8 upgrade slots filled with armor/weapons/debris vortex/frontal deflector.  In other words, the SB won't be invincible.

Quoting Howdidudothat, reply 51

Quoting Tyler7770, reply 48what bothers me is that everybody complains about the jumping star bases.... but thats not the biggest issue has anybody actually payed attention to the shield and hull research for VR

 

Shhhh...don't tell anyone.  It's the main reason I love VR so much.

 

And this is precisely why you can't really expect howthe to go on the forums to try to actually balance the game.